BT landline to go by 2025

[C24]

more good news?

Apparently this was announced in 2018 but they didn't tell me

I hope that those making this decision have similar problems when they reach retirement and reduced income.

[James Cutting]

Moving from a very outdated old technology system to one that is very common, a digital system (PSTN to IP) makes much sense. About time this country started to upgrade the network.

Still amazing in 2022 we're not all on Fibre yet. Though they are currently rolling out Fibre to the Premises...slowly.

[sdad]

Virgin sent me a new router this week (saying the old one would stop working six days after delivery). It has WiFi plus four wired sockets and two phone sockets, for VoIP. Apart from being no substitute for the four telephone points I currently have round the house for the landline, it won't be worth paying for as it will be useless in a power cut! Registered vulnerable customers have to apply for some sort of backup.

[page_verify]

I agree that the vulnerable and less tech savvy need a backup but the mobile networks are more resilient than the PSTN networks now and the volume of residential calls made on landlines compared to mobiles is astonishingly low. I’m glad the investment is focussing on where the usage is, rather than keeping a dying physical network going for increasingly little reason. Keeping a USB battery in the house is as vital now as keeping a candle, matches, torch and shortwave radio - which we all do, right?

[gyvespa]

I’m not sure if you are aware, but mobiles aren’t that expensive to run anymore.

I get unlimited calls, unlimited texts and 160 gig of data (that’s a shedload) for the huge sum of £20 a month with EE, although it might go up a small amount shortly in line with inflation.
This is less than my elderly mother pays for her BT anytime unlimited calls with no internet.

Contracts are available much cheaper than that, until I upped my data allowance I was paying just under £12.

I do still like the ‘feel’ of a landline as well and like you say ‘in a powercut/emergency’ you can’t beat it. However I can’t remember in the last 10 years having a power cut and my mobile not working. I may have just been lucky or it might be that the masts have some sort of battery back up.

I am on your side here being on a very low income at the moment and retirement looming on the horizon.
I’ve ditched my broadband provider which was approx £50 a month the thieving b’stards, and now just use my mobile data. In case you’re wondering iPlayer and YouTube, etc work fine and I rarely go anywhere near my allowance.
This will probably depend on your location but I’m in darkest Norfolk, a county not exactly well known for it’s connectivity !

[NorvilleRogers]

more good news?

Apparently this was announced in 2018 but they didn't tell me

I hope that those making this decision have similar problems when they reach retirement and reduced income.

Surely a mobile is much cheaper than a landline now?

[DUI]

From a relability point of view the old PSTN is much more reliable than mobile/IP systems.

Firstly the PSTN exchange had reliablity constaints, the system (not individual connections) was supposed to have five nines reliablity (99.999%) this works out to less than six minutes down time a year, and this is for any reason, a reboot/upgrade that caused the exchange to stop working would count as a failure.

Another advantage is that the traditional phone is powered by the exchange not by a wall socket so if you lose power the phone still works which might be important in some cases. I was talking to a woman just before the last storm, she had gone shopping and was stocking up on candles as after the previous storm she had been left without power for a fortnight, how many USB batteries is she supposed to have?

Also the coverage figures quoted by the mobile industry are very misleading the figures quoted are based on population density not ground coverage so large areas with low populations can have little or no coverage. With PSTN there was a duty to connect you where ever you lived this doesn't apply to the newer systems so if you can't get a signal were you live then tough.

I remember one of the pioneers of C++ programming language writing a paper discussing how to upgrade the software on a running PSTN telephone exchange without stopping, rebooting the exchange or even losing a call.

In the USA one of the state governments queried the mobile coverage figures supplied by the operators and sent a team out 'war driving' travelling a sample of the states roads and working which had a usable signal and were. The state's coverage area figures were less than half of those supplied by the operators.

On a personal level, during the summer of 2020 my BT fibre connection failed serveral times (in the mid afternoon when it was hot) and just before Christmas the local cell tower failed (strangly this didn't show up on the operators diagnostic web page but the phone refused to connect at the IP level although the RF connection seemed OK) and was like this all morning, before magically recovering.

[TARGET]

I am 81 and live in rural Lancashire with electricity supply on overhead line.Power cuts are quite common. Also suffer from an intermittant mobile signal.Openreach recently converted us to FTTH fibre.As a result total lack of communication is not unknown.

[gyvespa]

My previous home was on the same substation as the rest of our street, everyone else had dangling cables we had an underground feed, unfortunately we still got their power cuts.
Sometimes weekly until they sorted out the flakey transformer.

I seem to recall that the latest police and emergency service ‘radios’ now use the mobile phone infrastructure. Perhaps that’s why it is now a bit more reliable than it was.

I’ve had landlines fail 3 times, once reported, the first failure took 2 days to fix (it was a bank holiday) another took less than an hour and spectacularly I once reported a fault then 15 minutes later an engineer rang my mobile to say he’d fixed it as he was parked nearby when he got the report. No complaints there.

As for FTTH or fibre to the home. There’s no real reason why it should be unreliable. Although I think you’ll find the fibre only goes as far as the cabinet in the road. Virgin fibre is the same unless things have changed recently.
The Typhoon (still the Eurofighter in my head) uses fibre for its avionics and I’d like to think that was reliable ! It’s probably the cheap components made by the lowest bidder that are letting things down with BT.

[The Star of Woo]

At the risk of appearing totally stupid, I have no 'technical' idea or grasp of how things work. We have zero mobile phone coverage at home and rely solely on our landline for connection to everyone,. This is the first I've heard about BT landline service being withdrawn and am somewhat concerned.

[XWP29]

Took open reach 10 months and numerous visits and excuses to install FTTP here coupled with a route over our neighbours who kindly allowed access.
That install enabled us to drop the landline. Mobiles or zoom etc for phone calls. Unless everyone can change over, then alternatives must be made.
Got s going from 2-4Mb to 80Mb is a game changer.

BT Open Reach are getting to remote areas putting in the infrastructure. When it comes to connecting that to the home? In our experience, that was tricky and a major trial.

I doubt they’ll be ready by 2025.

Lobby your MP now if you are in remote area.

[TARGET]

Forget the full detail now but my fibre connection was due to be completed in December 2020 with my landline to be disconnected a few days later. Openreach failed to turn up but BT in their infinite wisdom still disconnected my landline.This left me unable to make any outgoing calls but incoming calls still got message saying i was not available but please leave a message which of course i couldnt access. BT then after a lot of aggro gave me a new tempory landline which enabled me to make outgoing calls and receive incoming calls from people i advised of new number.BT then charged me £60 for new landline connection and advised that new fibre connection date was planned at 0830 on a date in six months time. Inthe meantime an Openreach engineer was in our lane and i spoke to him explaining our situation.He offered to come and have a look in 30 minutes and completed our connection in half an hour.In the end i received compensation of £200 from BT.

[TARGET]

Forget the full detail now but my fibre connection was due to be completed in December 2020 with my landline to be disconnected a few days later. Openreach failed to turn up but BT in their infinite wisdom still disconnected my landline.This left me unable to make any outgoing calls but incoming calls still got message saying i was not available but please leave a message which of course i couldnt access. BT then after a lot of aggro gave me a new tempory landline which enabled me to make outgoing calls and receive incoming calls from people i advised of new number.BT then charged me £60 for new landline connection and advised that new fibre connection date was planned at 0830 on a date in six months time. Inthe meantime an Openreach engineer was in our lane and i spoke to him explaining our situation.He offered to come and have a look in 30 minutes and completed our connection in half an hour.In the end i received compensation of £200 from BT.

[tm74sqn]

A fibre-optic cable was recently installed down our street by a BT/OpenReach contractor, so we are nearly there? My question is, how will that be connected to phones in our house?
There must be some gadget(s) needed but I've np idea what, and do the existing copper wires from the street to our house play any part - help!

[TARGET]

My experience suggests the way they connect to individual propertys depends on the access.My nearest neighbour is 100 yards away and they routed an underground cable past my front gate to his property.Miie is fed by overhead line from pole to pole and i suspect reason is because they would have to go under a wall and path to feed an underground line to me.They fed cable through wall adjacent to electricity power point wiith two outlets required-one to feed the hub and one for another small unit where the fibre enters inside my property.The old copper landline is then removed.

[XWP29]

A fibre-optic cable was recently installed down our street by a BT/OpenReach contractor, so we are nearly there? My question is, how will that be connected to phones in our house?
There must be some gadget(s) needed but I've np idea what, and do the existing copper wires from the street to our house play any part - help!

FTTP needs to come into the property and is connected to a new internal box requiring a 240v socket nearby. I used my own router which is compatible with FTTP. Or they or your provider will offer you one. Info is all on line.

[page_verify]

From a relability point of view the old PSTN is much more reliable than mobile/IP systems.

I wonder from what perspective you're making that suggestion? If it's the resiliency of a technical network path from a telephone socket to a national exchange then perhaps, but we know that an information system starts at the device used to capture a user's information, not at a system's later data transfer stage. I'd suggest it's the resilience in the ability for a user to make a call where mobile has an advantage over PSTN as I'm not sure of an alternative to a mobile phone that people can take with in their car or out while walking in the countryside etc. etc. Consequently, my suggestion is that we should adequately fund a single universal communications network which is highly likely to meet residential and mobile needs, rather than fund an ageing residential network at the expense of investment in mobile networks.

[Condor68]

TARGET you were lucky with your friendly engineer most would have referred you to the minefield that is service providers and where does whose responsibility end.

[TARGET]

Condor 68.I couldnt agree more.Pure luck.In right place at right time for a change and a very obliging engineer

[C24]

Thank you all for the comments it has steered me and prompted me to research my current use.
No firm action yet but as the Russian threat to a repeat Chernobyl (& contaminated Welsh lamb) event; nukes to Ukraine and C-19 still hovering it is not too high on the list of things to do.
2025 is beyond my worry horizon.

Stay safe